This month’s Expert Speak comes from Bastiaan van Houten, MD, CPM Netherlands. In 2001 Bastiaan started his CPM career with a field sales job at Diageo and in 2004 moved into CPM’s Dutch head office for a role in direct sales. After various roles and positions Bastiaan started Cosine Benelux in 2011 and merged this business in 2015 with CPM Netherlands.

Innovation
In this article we would like to showcase a new solution for our logistic process and the path we followed to get there. We all know the challenges in our Industry, clients asking us to improve ROI by driving efficiency whilst on the other side we experience increasing prices and a tight labour market. Let’s take you to the situation that triggered this new business innovation.

The challenge
Imagine yourself; a client with an outsourced field sales team, the sales representatives are working on a maximum workload (#locations and #tasks per store). The client wants to expand the number of locations, without budget for extra resources. They ask CPM for a solution. We all know these challenges, drive efficiency and improve ROI.

On the other side the project manager has the same challenge. The labour market is tight, suppliers are raising their prices on a yearly base and we’ve already implemented several efficiency plans with this client. Expanding stores means expanding the team or downsizing the tasks.

The bottleneck
CPM organised a brainstorm and investigation session and it became clear: the big bottleneck in the efficiency was the time the team spent driving to the storage location and then to the first appointment. We knew if there was a way we could do things differently we could create more time in-store, which would result in achieving an increase in ROI.

The solution
Now that we had identified the bottleneck we were close to the solution. How can we improve? What is not used yet…..? Exactly, the night! Yes, we can do an overnight car delivery and forget about our traditional storage! Whilst the team sleeps we can get all materials delivered to their cars, so when they wake up they can go straight to their first address, eureka!

But would this be cost efficient? We put all the elements in a calculation module. The cost for cost calculation ended up equal, but we were able to increase in-store coverage by 6% to 8%. By switching to overnight car delivery we found a cost and time efficient solution. We managed to expand the stores, using the same quantity of people and tasks, without raising the costs. Case Closed!

Overnight car deliveryHow it works: The driver picks up the materials at a dropping point. The cars are equipped with a high tech GPS system that allocates the cars they need to supply and directly calculates the most efficient route. The car boot can be opened with a smart lock, which locks again automatically. Returns can be picked up by the driver at the same time. A flexible solution, that’s scalable when needed.

At this moment we’re rolling this out with our first client and expect many to follow. Overnight delivery is a cost effective solution for areas with a high density and raising salaries, small countries with many inhabitants or the bigger urban area’s in low density countries.

What’s next…..
As an outsourced sales agency we need to keep looking to the future and what the future is bringing us. The time we live in is very exciting; of course clients & employees are more and more demanding. However on the other side the world is changing so rapidly there are innovative solutions everywhere. Let’s explore them, find out how we can use and implement these new solutions in our daily business. Embrace new technologies and continuously be that innovative and flexible partner that looks one step ahead.